Remember them all

Monday

May 27, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Each Memorial Day, Americans pause to remember the men and women who have given their lives while serving in the nation’s armed forces. Sadly, each year adds to the long list of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

Since last Memorial Day, at least 224 American servicemen have died in the war in Afghanistan, bringing to 2,226 the number of Americans killed in the Afghan theater or supporting operations.

Together with the 4,487 Americans who died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, more than 6,700 American servicemen and women have given their lives since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when then President George W. Bush declared a global war on terror.

We Americans are divided by many things, great and small, from politics and religion to hot-button social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, and, too often, by considerations of race and class.

All such differences should be set aside on this day. Whatever we may think of U.S. foreign policy, all of us can agree that the men and women who volunteer to serve this nation, whether on land, in the air, or upon or beneath the waves, deserve our gratitude and respect. And those who have fallen deserve remembrance and prayers.

Nearly a century ago, in the fall of 1917, a shellshocked British soldier, Wilfred Owen, was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland. There, while recuperating from his physical and mental wounds, Owen wrote what was to become one of the most famous and haunting poems of his all-too-short career. His work is both beautiful and bleak, reflecting deep doubts about his faith and the disillusionment that comes with the experience of battle.

Like so many of his generation — like all too many of every generation — Owen would not survive the clash of arms. On Nov. 4, 1918, just one week before the armistice that ended World War I, he was killed in action along the Sambre-Oise Canal in Northern France.

On Nov. 11, 1918, Armistice Day, Owen’s family received a telegram informing them of his death, even as church bells sounded the news of the war’s end. His poetry has lived on, speaking to generations of veterans and survivors over the years, a stinging indictment of the often futile and always tragic nature of war.